Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire is considered the first, and perhaps the most influential, modernist poet. His embrace of the everyday and the vicissitudes of urban life; his fascination with the forbidden, such as the dark, seamy parts of 19th-century Paris; his spare, bold images; and his pervasive irony moved poetry away from Romantic concerns, and firmly into the realm of the modern. He did not shy away from topics that made his readers uncomfortable, dwelling on scenes of sex, death, and...